In the summer of 1992, in Zhizha Lane, Linchuan County in the south, seventeen-year-old Song Xiaoman "saw" the remnants of a dead person for the first time on a rainy night. He was born into a paper-making family. His father, Song Chunsheng, disappeared on a rainy night nine years ago. He fished out only one paper boat for three days. His mother remarried the following year. He grew up with his grandfather Song Shouzhuo guarding the "Song Ji Paper-making" sign.
The talent of tying up paper to fulfill the wishes of the deceased does not come in vain - every time a lingering thought disappears, Xiaoman loses a piece of his own memory. While making his vows, he picked up the unfinished thoughts of the deceased one by one, and walked step by step towards the ship that capsized that night in July 1983: seven temporary loading and unloading workers drowned, but it was said to the outside world that "the temporary workers broke up and ran away". "The whereabouts of the father who escorted the ship are unknown; among the six bodies recovered, two whose names were falsely claimed for ten years' pension; and the most respectable person in the county, star entrepreneur Huo Changgeng, was the deputy director who was responsible for the fraud.
Bai Shouyi, an evil papermaker from a foreign country, had been dormant for ten years for his drowned brother and entered Zhizhi Alley. He used Xiao Man as a chess piece and the Huo family as prey. The three parties were strangled between paper, fire and water: before his death, his grandfather spit out the secret he had kept for ten years, Huo Changgeng's defense collapsed when his son was critically ill, and Bai Shouyi burned his whole life in the fire at the dock. The shipwreck case was reopened and the seven people finally got their names back.
And the price Song Xiaoman paid was: he forgot Wen Shuning, the girl who wrote down everything he threw away in her notebook. The most cruel sentence was written in the suicide note left by his father: "If I break my promise, it will be my choice not to come back."
